Ol Parker (2018)

From one film with an Italian mother title to another – in the space of twenty-four hours, across the million miles from Il sorriso di mia madre to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again …   The director Ol Parker also wrote the screenplay (with a hand from Richard Curtis and Catherine Johnson).  This time, there are two storylines, comprising events occurring before and after those of the first film.  Like The Godfather: Part II, and the points of connection with Coppola’s magnum opus don’t end there:  newcomers to the Mamma Mia! cast include Andy García, still best known for his role in Godfather III.  (The points of connection do end there.)   Mamma Mia! 2 describes (a) how the twenty-something version of the heroine Donna got to know her daughter Sophie’s father(s) and (b) Sophie’s grand re-opening of her mother’s taverna as the Hotel Bella Donna, named not for the poison but in memory of its late founder, who died a year ago.  Donna’s cause of death isn’t explained but plenty of viewers will know it’s that Meryl Streep (nearly) doesn’t do sequels.  For most of the film, Streep’s Donna is just a photograph on the wall.   Otherwise, the gang’s all here – Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård as the father figures, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters as Donna’s best friends, Amanda Seyfried as Sophie, Dominic Cooper as her husband.

In her first scene, Donna’s younger self (Lily James) arrives late for her Oxford University graduation ceremony, where she’s been chosen by her fellow students to give the valedictory address.  This suggests American high school rather than New College, Oxford (the legend on screen is specific about place and time – 1979) and so does the opening ABBA number into which Donna launches.  It’s ‘When I Kissed the Teacher’, which I’ve always found more disturbing, as well as much more vivid, than the Police’s similarly-themed, deadly serious ‘Don’t Stand Too Close to Me’.  The film’s reworking of the song makes it even more risqué (for 1979) by changing the sex of the kissed teacher.  It does so because the Oxford Vice-Chancellor presiding at the ceremony is female (Celia Imrie).  Lily James’s solo soon morphs into the public debut of Donna and the Dynamos, with the student-age versions of Rosie (Alexa Davis) and Tanya (Jessica Keenan-Wynn) joining in – along with, in due course, the VC.  The staging and costuming are almost breathtakingly tasteless.  Celia Imrie’s contribution is especially bizarre, not least (though not only) because an authority figure grooving with the best of them is what you expect at the end of a musical comedy.  It all makes you wonder how far OTT Mamma Mia! 2 is going to go.  In the event, it never again reaches this opening number’s level of loony abandon.

As a piece of film-making, this follow-up is a good bit less chaotic than its forerunner; as a result, it’s less eccentrically colourful too.  In several cases, the junior versions of the first film’s principals are more accomplished singers and dancers than the originals but this isn’t simply a matter of damning with faint praise:  the younger performers are also less individual.  In the post-Donna part of the story, when Christine Baranski (Tanya) and Julie Walters (Rosie) do ‘Angeleyes’ (with Amanda Seyfried), it’s both funny and a reminder of the hammy zest that’s been missing since early on.  The newbies inevitably lack the richness of association with previous screen roles that their seniors have (and which was one of the main charms of the 2008 Mamma Mia!).  What associations the youngsters do have turn out to be confusing.  Jeremy Irvine – as Sam, the young Pierce Brosnan – not only looks more like a young Colin Firth:  he actually played the Firth character of thirty years ago in The Railway Man.  Sam’s first encounter with Donna involves his calming a frightened horse, which naturally brings to mind Irvine’s biggest role to date, in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse.  Hugh Skinner, who does play the young Harry (Firth), is a different kind of problem.  Since Skinner is always and idiosyncratically the same, the idea of him developing into someone else is virtually nonsensical.

At the graduation ceremony, the Vice-Chancellor tells Donna that she (Donna) is going to do great things – a line that, in a cheesy film, is bound to be an accurate prediction.  Getting to run a taverna on a Greek island can’t place Donna top of the list of high-achieving Oxford alumnae; more likely, the VC foresees that she’ll one day be Meryl Streep.  Lily James has terrific verve and energy, as well as a fine singing voice.  Without being in the least imitative, she anticipates Streep effectively – by suggesting that she too has bags more talent than Mamma Mia! needs.  It’s not James’s fault that the whole of young Donna’s story similarly feels surplus to requirements (even if it’s a model of narrative sophistication beside the hotel-opening part).  It’s not her fault either that, well though she performs all her numbers, she doesn’t get the opportunity that her predecessor in the role of Donna was given and seized, courtesy of ‘The Winner Takes It All’ – the point at which Streep’s enthusiastic slumming it in the first film turned into something dramatically considerable.

After Lily James, the standout young performer is Josh Dylan as Bill, the Stellan Skarsgård-to-be.  It was only when I saw and recognised Dylan’s name in the closing credits that I realised who I’d been watching.  In December 2016, Sally and I saw an enjoyable revival of Sheppey, a Somerset Maugham play, at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.  John Ramm was excellent as the title character; several of the supporting cast played two or more parts.   Josh Dylan, who’d graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama only the previous year, had three roles.  I thought him OK in two of these, excellent in the third and, all in all, a young actor to keep an eye on.   Seeing him catapulted from the bijou performing space of the Orange Tree into a big-screen blockbuster, if not quite a Daniel Kaluuya moment (see Get Out), was a funny surprise and pleasure.  Proficient as they are, there’s a sense with Alexa Davis and Jessica Keenan-Wynn that they’re glancing over their shoulder at Julie Walters and Christine Baranski.  Dylan, like Lily James, is independent of his senior alter ego; at the same time, his remarkable relaxedness foreshadows Skarsgård’s presence.  Dylan’s accent is nicely ambiguous: failing to recognise him, I wondered if the young Bill was actually Swedish or British or American.  He moves well too, in his and Lily James’s duet ‘Why Did It Have to Be Me?’

So how are the familiar faces?  Pierce Brosnan seems rather unhappy.   When the opportunity to reprise ‘SOS’ arises, he chants indecisively for just a few lines, as if nervous of getting the scornful reviews he got (I thought undeservedly) the first time around.  Of course, we realise that the half-heartedness is really broken-heartedness – the song makes Sam think of Donna – but you wonder too if Brosnan is missing Meryl Streep.  The highlight of Stellan Skarsgård’s performance is definitely his brief appearance in heavy prosthetic and padding as Bill’s twin brother.  I was fooled by this and momentarily appalled that Skarsgård had put on so much weight since I last saw him (only a few weeks ago, as a talking head in Filmworker).  I can’t really explain why I felt more warmly towards Colin Firth in this second film – a decade on, familiarity seems to have bred a mild affection.   Time hasn’t diminished Julie Walters’s comedic gusto and invention, or her native believability.  The last quality is almost jarring in the context of something like Mamma Mia!, as you occasionally register that Rosie resembles an actual person.  There’s no danger of that happening with Christine Baranski but her cartoon vamp Tanya is, as before, agreeably assured.  Amanda Seyfried and even Dominic Cooper are more likeable than they were in the first film.   During the last ten years, without hitting stratospheric heights, both have built solid screen careers.  That may partly explain why Seyfried in particular seems less anxious to impress than she was in 2008.  Sophie has several numbers but it’s a pity there aren’t more:  the clarity of Seyfried’s singing voice is lovely.

The recruitment of Cher, making her first film appearance since Burlesque (2010), has been hailed as the casting coup of Mamma Mia 2.   As Sophie’s estranged grandmother Ruby, she arrives by helicopter from America for the Bella Donna party.  She certainly increases the camp factor but it’s a congealed camp that Cher, seemingly worn out by cosmetic surgeries, embodies.  The movie briefly grinds to a halt around her, the result not of showstopping star presence but of lines delivered slowly and dully.  Her singing of ‘Fernando’ (the name of the Andy García character, an old flame of Ruby’s) is all right but doesn’t have the I’ll-show-these-amateurs panache you might expect.  It was around this point that I was interrupted from peering at my watch by Sally’s urgent whisper, ‘You’ll miss Meryl!’    When I looked up, she’d gone; afterwards, Sally said she’d probably mistaken a distance shot of Lily James in Donna’s trademark dungarees for the missing woman but it was a worrying few minutes.  Eventually, Meryl appears, as the spirit of Donna, at the climactic christening of Sophie’s baby boy.  She and Amanda Seyfried sing ‘My Love, My Life’ together.  Their harmonies are sweet and charming, though Meryl Streep somehow looks more persuasively witchy than she did in Into the Woods.

The issue of whether there are enough first-rate ABBA numbers to sustain a second film is settled happily and brazenly.  Although the inclusion of ‘Andante, Andante’ (new to me) raises temporary doubts, Ol Parker sensibly decides to reprise several songs from Mamma Mia! 1, including ‘Super Trouper’, a personal favourite.    I was pleased the film played out on this, with all the main characters – past and present – involved.  It might seem unfortunate to give Meryl Streep, as the late Donna, the line ‘The sight of you will prove to me I’m still alive’ but it doesn’t matter.  In this glitzy curtain call, the performers are no longer the people they were meant to be but this time … chiefly … themselves.  The reviews for Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again have been much kinder than they were for the first movie.   In plenty of cases, that’s probably less a comment on the relative competence of Ol Parker’s direction and writing than an expression of if-you-can’t-beat-‘em resignation.  Critics in 2008 were able to rubbish Phyllida Lloyd’s picture before it became a huge box-office hit:  just because Mamma Mia! was already a smash on stage didn’t mean it would repeat the trick on screen.  Today, they’re wary of simply deriding a secure commercial phenomenon.  More than one review I’ve read commends the sequel for its greater self-awareness – ie  awareness of its fundamental naffness.  That’s a poor reason for a red tomato rather than a green one[1] but the film is well worth seeing.  The spectacle of an array of gifted people having a good time with enduringly terrific ABBA numbers is still infectious.

23 July 2018

[1] At the time of writing, the new film has an 80% ‘fresh’ rating from 177 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  The first Mamma Mia! is 54% fresh from 170 reviews.